The purpose of this research is to examine black African and Native American societies before European contacts in regard to their religions, political structure, and economics. If the pre-encounter societies of Africa and the Americas differed in the hold they had on the respective territories they inhabited, they appear to have been similar in possessing well-developed and refined (though unappreciated, by the Europeans) structures of social organization, including religious, political, and economic structures. In the case of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec, politics was organized around imperial authority. In Africa, too, there were indigenous empires with their own political and economic systems. Leaving aside imperial Egypt, which was linked with and well known to Europe before the first millennium, there were empires of Kush in the Sudan, of Ethiopia, and of Nubia (Davidson, 1966, 39-41).
The religious environment of pre-encounter Africa was multifaceted, and remains so to the present day. Davidson says that African religion was as varied "in almost as many ways as there were African peoples. . . . [P]eople living in he rain forests of the Congo, scarcely ever seeing the sky, came to have very different ideas about the origin and operation of the world from people living in the sky-enclosing plains of the open grasslands" (Davidson, 1966, 123). On the other hand, running through most specific religions was a persistent belief in a "High God," which was associated with a foundational life force, plus lesser gods "who acted as intermediaries and also presided over the physical workings of the universe" (Davidson, 1966, 124). Africans' account of the Fall is associated with the arrival of woman, who among the Dinka in the Sudan in East Africa was greedy and among the Ashanti in Ghana in West Africa was an aggressively domesticating force.
By and large, the peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa had no monumental religious architect...